Digital White Papers

60 WWW.ILTANET.ORG | ILTA WHITE PAPER LITIGATION AND PRACTICE SUPPORT Beyond Excel: Overcoming Obstacles to Get the Business Intelligence You Need The Power of Dashboards Real-time dashboards enable smarter discovery that leads to reduced cost and improved efficiency, and represent the next generation of legal process management. With immediate access to who has done what, when and how, key stakeholders can make immediate decisions to control costs. Dashboards allow you to monitor the progress of collection, processing and review for important custodians and prioritize (or scale up) to meet deposition deadlines. You can review costs that have been incurred, forecast future needs and collaborate in real-time; most importantly, you can identify inefficiencies and act on them. With beer tools come beer projections. Imagine being able to confidently predict project delivery times, provide accurate budgets to the dollar and enter into alternative fee agreements with more confidence, bringing transparency to the entire process. Aorneys can set thresholds for project managers to monitor through the dashboard, helping to set expectations and reduce waste. There is no "Killer App" Considering the enormous advantages to be realized, many litigation support departments are on the prowl for a "killer app," a software solution that will make all their dashboard dreams come true. But the inconvenient truth is that a perfect dashboard tool does not exist, and even if it did it would only do as much good as the data it could reach. If dashboards do not have access to data, they cannot display it. And this problem, the "reach problem," ends up being the most important challenge to overcome if BI is going to make its way into legal. The Reach Problem It is fairly simple to implement BI technology in most industries because companies have control over their data on a corporate server, Google Drive, Dropbox, or whatever. Rarely is it on servers outside the control of their own IT administrators. Legal is different because most law firms and corporations rely heavily on service providers – hosting vendors, review/staffing companies, processing shops, etc. – to assist with eDiscovery. By outsourcing data, firms and corporations effectively put the data, and any insight one might gain by analyzing it, out of reach. When data is dispersed to multiple vendors, using multiple data centers and stored in multiple proprietary applications, BI becomes extremely difficult. To solve the reach problem, organizations must first bring data back under their control. Solving the Reach Problem: Insource v. Outsource There are multiple ways of gaining control over one's data, but the solutions typically fall into one of two categories: insource or outsource. Build an in-house solution and bear the costs associated with infrastructure, soware licensing and human resources, or outsource to trusted vendors and by doing so risk losing control over costs, data security and service levels. This binary choice is not unique to the legal industry, but the stakes are particularly high in legal due to the extraordinary costs of electronic discovery and the outsized risk associated with exposing sensitive client data – a risk made even higher as clients seek tighter control over the data they send to outside counsel for discovery. One hundred percent of the data must be accounted for - every file, every piece of media - with air-tight integrations between client, outside counsel and vendors. With better tools come better projections. Imagine being able to confidently predict project delivery times, provide accurate budgets to the dollar and enter into alternative fee agreements with more confidence, bringing transparency to the entire process.

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